FIG. 1 is a diagram showing the elements of an e-mail system, especially for sending e-mail including images from a hard-copy scanner to the Inbox of a recipient or “client.” Such “scan-to-e-mail” functions are common in the context of digital copiers. Here, a “sender” 10, which may be in the form of any source of data to be sent, such as personal computer, but which is here shown as a digital copier with a hard-copy scanner, sends a set of data to a first server 12, which is typically an SMTP or internet fax server familiar in the art. The data is then relayed from first server 12 to a chain of subsequent servers, here indicated as 14a, 14b, etc. As is familiar in e-mail systems, an e-mail message will pass through any number of servers 14a, 14b, etc., until a desired destination is reached. At the message's destination, a server 16, such as a POP3 or IMAP server as generally known in the art, retains the data for access by a client associated therewith, such as a personal computer having an e-mail account.
The first SMTP server 12 in a chain represents a barrier for documents of a size larger than some maximum. Many SMTP servers have a set maximum size of any data file that can be admitted thereto for further relaying: such a maximum size is typically 10 MB, but in practical situations can be as low as 2 MB. It is known, however, that a large document can be broken up or, as will be called here, “segmented” into smaller files, which are sent separate through a network and reassembled at the client, in a manner which is largely invisible to a casual user. A vendor of software for performing this segmentation and reassembly is Allegro® RomMailer™, which will perform the segmentation if the job is greater than a preset maximum; however, as far as is known, this software merely sends off segments of the job as it is processed, and at no time calculates a total size of the job or cares how many segments are being created.
Given presently-supported standards for SMTP servers, the SMTP server such as 12 simply returns to the sender 10 a document that it has deemed to be too large: there is generally no means by which a sender of a document to a server can know in advance what the maximum size of a document or file can be submitted to any SMTP server. If a message known to be large is arbitrarily divided into segments with each segment sent as a separate e-mail message, a practical problem can occur in a network with too many such messages flooding a network, and interfering with the relaying of other, unrelated e-mail messages. However, because of the essentially passive nature of e-mail servers as currently supported (i.e., too-large segments are simply sent back, and/or a flooded server simply accepts no more segments), it is difficult to prevent such flooding of a network by the sending of a large message. This problem of very large e-mail messages becomes particularly acute when full-color images such as photographs are attempted to be sent from a computer or a hard-copy scanner, as a small number of such images can approach a maximum segment size for a server.
The present invention relates to a system which can help control the traffic of segments of a large e-mail message.